Life is generic, and therefore so is our AI. Botcopalypse postponed for now. Technofear can stand down. As with Zombie move tropes, the real threat is from the humans. Interacting with ChatGPT is not that different from talking to any bureaucracy. I have in the past set out a few …
If you did not have imposter syndrome you would basically be living in your parents’ attic right now (apologies if you are in fact living there right now. I’m sure it’s nice). You cannot get rid of imposter syndrome but you can feel better about it and use some elements …
Research is a process of constantly theorizing from evidence. In order to give our findings life and meaning we can apply frames that allow us to do that and also help us work together and react to practical problems as they come up. One frame is normalization. As sociologists we …
I’ve read and written enough to know when I see a masterclass in not saying anything, while appearing to say a lot. Documents show the conditions of their creation – the way they are stitched together from different drafts, sometimes by different authors, tells you a lot about how they …
Research has its own language which reflects different theories – abstract ways of thinking about what research is, based on ideas of what reality we are examining, what the world is ‘really like’ (ontology) and how much we can know about it (epistemology). What I’m talking about relates to very …
‘The cherry tree appears to be in a cut down situation’ is not a good sentence construction if the reality is ‘I cut down the cherry tree’. The former construction is common in risk adverse modern life. Acknowledge just enough of the situation while obfuscating all direction, cause, effect and …
I am thinking of those too-perfect cases that illustrate what we want students to know but which turn out to be overblown or plain wrong. My case is Maines’ (2001) The Technology of Orgasm, which used to be a central example in a lecture I delivered in intoxication, technology and …
Ontology (‘what is’) is a topic students often have difficulty grappling with in their work. It tends to end up being a set of buzzwords that people lay fealty to (interpretivist! Social constructionist!) and generalist statements about society being ever changing and such. It should be a set of thinking …
As Olivia Rodrigo so wisely said ‘it’s brutal out there’. But we are never so brutal as with ourselves. Apply widely and be adaptable – you can fit into more posts and get something from them than you may realise. Recognise what they are looking for. Aim high and value …
In my quest to expose the writing process I have structured this paper using named paragraphs. Each paragraph has a title showing the purpose it performs as part of the overall paper structure. This should help putting the paper together as a coherent argument, showing how each bit adds to …
